Scope and Contents note
A journal and fifteen letters documenting the overland journey of Sarah Wayward Lewis with her husband and family to California in 1849. The Lewis family departed from St. Joseph, Missouri in April, 1849, and the collection contents detail their trip along the Mormon Route, encounters with hostile Native Americans on the Great Plains, privations, hardships, and internal strife among their traveling companions; and their sojourn along the Humboldt and Truckee Rivers prior to their traverse of Donner Pass into the goldfields of California. The correspondence, from Sarah Lewis to her mother, Frances Wayward of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, also provides details about life in a mining camp before Sarah and her children settled in Sacramento in November of the same year.
